Lost in a good book

I often find myself totally lost in a good book, only to come to hours later and slightly disoriented. But it's rare these days for these page turners to be not only by Australian authors, but also by women.

But I ramble through the aisles of my local library changed this, and I stumbled across Kerry Greenwood's fantastic Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries series.
I'd caught the television adaptation a few times and enjoyed it but the books were like a breath of fresh air and I devoured both Queen of the Flowers and Dead Man's Chest in a week.

The combination of an irrepressible herione; stylish, sassy and 'fast' Phryne Fisher, her companion Dot - a demurely comic lady's maid and a good old-fashioned 'whodunnit' makes for engaging reading. And each tale is written in an easy-to-read yet intelligent way. 50 Shades of Grey rubbish this is not!

 Melbourne in the 1920s never has a dull moment, and with the circus in town, and the Festival of Flowers just around the corner Phryne has her work cut out for her. But combine a missing girl who has washed up on the beach, and a missing daughter to boot and Phryne has another mystery to solve. Queen of the Flowers delves in Melbourne's dark underbelly and is a pageturner from the very start

In Dead Man's Chest Phryne and her daughters Jane and Ruth swap Melbourne for the beach town of Queenscliff. But from the moment they arrive things aren't quite right. A mysterious braid snipper haunts the town, there are missing housekeepers and a secret pirate treasure to be found.

I'd long been complaining to The Boy that I needed to up the ante on the intellgence factor in my books in an attempt to re-engage my brain which is still on holidays six months after I returned to the real world and as a result Tolstoy, Austen and Dickens were all on my reading list.

I've since added the rest of Greenwood's series to it. Besides, who can resist an author who lists that she lives with a registered wizard on her biography?